MENTAL FURNITURE #1

Sherlock Holmes
©1997 Dennis Leri

"...a man's brain originally is like an empty attic and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all number of every sort that he comes across, so the knowledge that might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has difficulty in laying his hands on it. Now the skilled workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain attic. He will have nothing but tools which may help him in his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order." So said Sherlock Holmes to Dr. Watson. (A Study in Scarlet, A. Conan Doyle)

Browsing around in a bookstore in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1979 I found a copy of the complete stories of Sherlock Holmes. Moshe noticed the book as I carried it into the Feldenkrais Institute. He immediately began to discuss the stories and quote from his favorites. Seemingly, he knew them all by heart. Wanting to discover for myself 'whodunit,' I told him we could discuss the stories after I had finished them. We did share and enjoy a mutual enthusiasm for the stories. Moshe took to calling me Dr. Watson for a while. In response to my questions he would say, "Elementary my dear Watson," or, "Given what I have done today, what do you think I will do tomorrow Dr. Watson?" 'Sherlock' Feldenkrais had many of his favorite detective's traits.

Moshe had an incredible library in his house. One of his very favorite books was one on criminal psychology produced by Scotland Yard. Moshe: "More real psychology in there than in a hundred psychology books." Jeremy Krause corroborated Moshe's enthusiasm for the book in a discussion we had in the summer of '92. Moshe knew his library well. And, even more to the point, he knew how to find what he needed in it. He once told our San Francisco training his method of studying anatomy. Rather than study anatomy from the beginning of a book straight to the end, he instead would consult his books after working with someone. In that way he could relate his unique encounter with a person to the otherwise academic subject of anatomy. He built up a very encyclopedic and concrete knowledge of anatomy by grounding it in actual experience.

But anatomy books and physiology books were not a major part of his library. There were books from almost every domain of knowledge. All those books and their related fields of knowledge constituted Moshe's 'mental furniture.' The word furniture means different things to different people. We can form an image of individual chairs, table, couches, stools, etc. But, we find it harder to form an image of furniture because it's not a thing but a collection of things, a whole greater than the sum of its parts. We can understand Moshe's need or appreciation for anatomy books, books on physics and mathematics, psychology books, judo manuals, etc. They are pieces of some greater whole. We often find it difficult to form an image of the greater whole that constituted Moshe's mental attic. We may even question why it might be important or interesting to look into the matter. In future columns I will examine some of the 'pieces of furniture' in Moshe's mental attic. Here we'll simply introduce the idea and hint at a pragmatic methodology useful to link it all together.

Sherlock Holmes had a method of using his mental furniture. He would observe the crime scene and all persons relating to it. Additionally important to Holmes were the incorrect conjectures of Dr. Watson and the Scotland Yard detectives. Holmes would make guesses -- hypotheses, inferences -- based upon what pieces of his mental furniture were 'moved.' If, for example, he smelled a certain odor then the piece of furniture relating to chemistry and poisons would be 'moved.' In that way he would form a hypothesis about the means and motivation of a crime. The hypothesis would guide his investigation and that hypothesis might change. Hypotheses which Holmes called 'deductions' are more properly called abductions after C.S. Peirce, a 19th century philosopher. Considered by most Europeans to be America's greatest philosopher, Peirce distinguished three types of inferences: deduction, induction and abduction.

Peirce formulated it this way.

Deduction:

Rule - All the beans from this bag are white.
Case - These beans are from this bag.
Result - These beans are white.

Induction:

Case - These beans are from this bag.
Result - These beans are white.
Rule - All the beans from this bag are white.

Abduction:

Rule - All the beans from this bag are white.
Result - These beans are white.
Case - These beans are from this bag.

If you think about this a bit you can see that with deduction there is no possibility of error and no possibility of novelty. In going from the general to the specific it must follow that the beans are white. With induction there is a possibility of error as well as correctness in our guessing. Each drawing out of a white bean is a new confirmation of our guess while the drawing out a differently colored bean would be really novel. The general rule would be invalidated with a singularly different result. But we are justified in making the guess because in every result so far the beans have been white. While the probability is high for all the beans being white it is by no means certain. With abduction the guess stands the greatest chance of being in error but with it comes the possibility of the greatest creative leap. Here, unlike in induction, we conclude without any prior evidence that the beans are from the bag. We have a Rule, All the beans... ; we have a Result, These beans are ... ; and we guess the Case, These beans are from this bag. That's the guess. Peirce considered one of the greatest abductions of all time to belong to the astronomer Kepler. With abduction one invents context for content. In Kepler's case he initiated a new world view.

Schematically, this is Kepler's hypothesis: For all bodies in motion, the fact that a given body moves by describing an elliptic orbit implies that that body passes through given positions geometrically determined in such-and-such a way; but Mars passes through given positions geometrically determined in such-and-such a way; hence Mars moves by describing an elliptic orbit.

Kepler on scant evidence used what he knew from one field, geometry, to generate a hypothesis concerning anomalies in Mars' orbit pertaining to the field of astronomy. After making his hypothesis he gathered more evidence to support it. It is vitally important that a hypothesis be falsifiable; otherwise it is not testable. Kepler generated not just a new observation but a new way of doing astronomy. I maintain Feldenkrais did the same for the domain of learning and education. To abduct means to lead or take away; to kidnap. Here it means to lead away something from both semantic fields of explanation thereby bringing forth a new semantic field. Semantic fields are something like contexts for understanding words and deeds. A Feldenkrais training hopefully creates a context for understanding words and actions related to one's being able to generate a series of actions that would be understood by one's peers as a Feldenkrais lesson.

Each of us has our own mental furniture. Our work as Feldenkrais practitioners can be refined by quantum leaps through our making abductions and learning how to test them so as to validate or invalidate them. A piece of our mental furniture (our areas of knowledge, i.e., cognitive domains) can get perturbed by the particulars presented to us in our practices. We then make guesses that orient and guide our lesson. We are presented with more particulars and we make more guesses and so on. Moshe once said that without the ability to go from the particular to the general and general to particular anything (of importance to understanding and advancing the Feldenkrais Method) done in a particular lesson would die with that lesson. Some practitioners do great individual lessons but they do not see what in their lessons has general import and what has only incidental import. 'Import' means to bring something in and what is most important is brought most deeply in. Being able to juggle a number of general principles with any number of particular percepts and guess what is important and needed, defines what a practitioner is.

I don't think we have taken into account the kinds of abductions Moshe may have made given the motions of human bodies and the domains of knowledge that he commanded. We need to look at his and our own mental furniture. If we choose wisely what we have in our attic then we can begin to form and test the kind of hypotheses that distinguish our work.